James McCure - The Steam Pig

“Uhuh. Which makes the time of death somewhere between eleven and midnight.”

“Hard boiled egg-see any shells, boss?”

“There’s one in the kitchen. Lucky she didn’t like them soft or we wouldn’t have any pointers. This is interesting about the traces of drugs.”

“The heart ones?”

“No, the sleeping. They had this little dolly all sorted out-and her doctor, too. The bastards.”

Zondi demanded to have the whole story and he got it, right up to the poser of the panchromatic panties.

“So you see,” Kramer added, “there are things which just don’t add up in this place. Come through and have a look yourself.”

Before Zondi joined the force, he had spent a year as a houseboy. This had given him an eye for the details of a white man’s abode which was as fresh and perceptive as that of an anthropologist making much of what the natives themselves never noticed. Kramer had found it invaluable more than once.

They started in the kitchen; an unremarkable room barely big enough to turn about it, which had presumably been a store-room once.

There was a collection of invoices stuck on a nail.

“She ordered by phone, boss. Groceries, chemists, clothes from John Orr’s. But mostly food.”

“She didn’t pay by cheque, you know, settled in cash,” Kramer told him. “She kept her money in the post office, just over R200.”

Zondi had the top off the rubbish bin. Understandably enough Rebecca had overlooked her chore in the excitement and it was still full. An inquiring eyebrow was raised at Kramer who grinned back.

“You’ve got a bloody hope,” he said. “That’s kaffir work.”

The grin was returned.

“Besides, there’s the egg shell on the top. Now don’t tell me somebody’s going to hide something in there and not break the pieces putting it all back.”

Zondi went on poking into the soggy mess with the handle of a feather duster.

“Well?”

“That’s a new lot of washing-up powder on the window sill, boss. When women throw away a box they never squash it down like a man would to make more room for the rest. They put it in just like that with all the air inside.”

“And you can’t feel one?”

“No.”

“Come on, Zondi, the one over there is not all that new, you know.”

“But it must be in here, boss.”

Zondi picked up the pair of rubber gloves hanging over the sink and slipped them on. Then he spread a newspaper and began emptying the bin.

Miss Le Roux had certainly been a young lady of regular habits. Levels of the daily round in reverse order-supper, tea, lunch, tea, house-cleaning, breakfast, tea-appeared without variation, although they did become less distinct the deeper Zondi delved.

“No one’s been into that lot, I can tell you for a fact,” Kramer remarked, vaguely irritated.

“Quite right, boss.”

Zondi rocked back on his heels and held up a crumpled cardboard container covered in tea leaves.

“Squashed flat,” Kramer said.

“Folded over,” Zondi said, choosing a clean sheet of newspaper to deposit it on. The carton was slippery and he had to try twice before tearing it open. Out rolled a reel of recording tape, badly damaged by flames.

“Jesus.”

“Monday a week ago, I think,” Zondi said. “After this missus’s supper.”

Kramer spilled some bread coupons from their box and placed the reel in it. As he did so, a number of small pieces of tape fluttered to the floor. He salvaged them. The whole thing was in bits. He sealed the box with some adhesive tape from the table drawer.

“Sergeant Prinsloo can come and take some pretty pictures of this,” Zondi said with satisfaction, pointing to the mess he had made and shedding his gloves. “That is now white man’s work.”

For the moment Kramer was totally preoccupied with the find. He took it through into the living-room and put it on the mantelpiece. He regarded it from three separate angles. He decided that he would know what it contained before the night was out. The hell with official channels.

There was a loud hiss behind him. Zondi was in the doorway, spraying himself all over with an aerosol can of air-freshener.

“Finished in the kitchen, boss?” he asked blandly. He smelt pungently wholesome, like a Swedish brothel.

“I’m going to use the phone,” Kramer said, making for the bedroom door. “Just you take a look at that lot on the piano meantime.”

Zondi obliged. He found the entire contents of the writing bureau, plus other assorted effects, arranged neatly along the lid-but not in the usual twin categories of “personal” and “business”. For, as Kramer had repeatedly stressed during the briefing, there was nothing remotely personal among it all with which to begin a pile. Not a letter, a postcard, or even a snapshot.

What there was hardly made absorbing reading; two receipt books, one full and the other just begun; a ledger for tax purposes; a notebook containing pupils’ names, more than a year’s bills all stamped “paid”, and a reminder from a jeweller’s about a repair. The collection, however, provided the first answer of the day by explaining where all the flowers had gone-or many of them anyway. Miss Le Roux had not taken private pupils in the ordinary sense but appeared to have had some arrangement with St Evelyn’s School for Girls round the corner. It was a boarding establishment and term had ended a fortnight before.

Kramer came in looking pleased with himself.

“I’ve got a bloke who’ll look at the tape tonight,” he said. “Find any trace of the adult pupils there?”

“Nothing, boss. Maybe she did not want to pay tax on the fellows.”

“Could be.” The thought had occurred more than once, yet it still struck Kramer as being very out of character. The records were meticulous and Miss Le Roux plainly knew nothing of less hazardous tactics such as loading an expense allowance.

Zondi started switching off the lights. He was right, it was time to get going-every minute was worth double until news of the investigation broke. Kramer gathered the papers into a music case, collected the tape and went out on to the small verandah. He just caught a glimpse of someone ducking away from Mrs Bezuidenhout’s kitchen window.

The night was wild.

Seen from the air, Trekkersburg was a green-grey mould at the bottom of an unfired bowl. Now, over the brim of blunt mountains to the west, came pouring a hot, thick wind which swirled dead leaves aloft like sediment and infused every living thing with its strange agitation. The wind did not come often, but when it did things happened.

Which suited Kramer down to the ground. He delighted in it, wondered why he had not noticed it before. Each bluster made him more impatient as Zondi fiddled with the front door, making quite certain the lock was secure. So he started alone down the short path and out through the side gate. He found himself in a small lane once used by the night-soil cart, it being a very old part of the town. The lighting was poor but he made his way down it quickly enough to have the car revving loudly by the time Zondi caught up. Then he drove off as if the leopard-skin seats had snarled.

Kramer dropped Zondi outside the city hall and headed for 49 Arcadia Avenue where-according to the telephone directory-Dr J. P. Matthews had his home and surgery. It was well after eleven but the man was a physician and this an emergency call. The tape expert was an amateur, a proofreader at the Gazette, who would not be home until 1 a.m.

Zondi had been left with instructions to find Shoe Shoe. He was to wheel him in his wheelbarrow to the corner of De Wet Street and the Parade and wait there to be picked up.

Only four years back Shoe Shoe had been an up-and-coming mobster with a pay-night protection racket just beyond Trekkersburg in the Bantu township of Peacehaven. Every Friday he had twenty men at the bus terminus who would escort breadwinners home at R1 a time. Not a vast sum but on a good night-particularly after some idiot had refused the service and was brutally reprimanded-the takings were nothing to be sniffed at.